bordigasbodega [he/him]
dunno, i forced myself to read through capital v1 because of org educational requirements and still got a ton out of it. admittedly i’d already read a bunch of capital illustrated, capital abridged books before that, which made it easier imo and of course there is a ton that i didn’t get and ill have to re-read w/ footnotes, patience etc, but i was actually surprised that a quick read of capital is a) possible b) worth it. now hegel on the other hand…
on the real though what are these rich motherfuckers doing with this water exactly? are they filling up their own private oceans or something wft
part of loving yourself is refusing to perfomatively flagellate yourself (or shit on yourself, beat yourself up) out of an understanding that it does not advance communism or your own mental health one bit and does no one any good including yourself. constructive crit/self-crit is different. what makes it constructive vs not is actually identifying, rejecting and removing classist, racist, national chauvinistic, homophobic, transphobic (or if you are in an org may involve addressing deviations from line) behaviors and ideas from your brain and replacing these with correct or better ones. if you have good comrades and are willing to work on yourself that tranformation can happen but its also a long process
if you read what i wrote i did not defend them. i called them reactionary and scabs and i do think the extra money they make vs uber drivers makes them that way and makes them more likely to be that way. we should definitely focus more on the uber workers than them in terms of trying to get them class conscious. earlier i wrote a post that I edited out that basically said the same thing and said these accounting categories aren’t super useful sometimes but what is important is class consciousness and that there are reactoinary layers of proletarians as well so we have to be careful with these definitions and who we try to organize with. anyway i wanna back away from hexbear for a bit to do some IRL stuff but i think we can agree on some things and disagree to degree on others so ill leave it here for now
right but you run into the contradiction that the uber worker by that classification is also bourgeois
also, many people can’t afford to get into debt to buy the car either, so that makes them bourgs as well i guess, that’s a barrier of entry right there and is kinda arbitrary
i also am not placing a moral category on them i just don’t think marx even dealt with the question of piecmeal work in this way either and also i think these definitions are lacking if we walk ourselves into an argument that uber workers that ofen make below minimum wage are bourgs because they own the means of production and dont get paid a wage. owner operator truckers are just a more contradictory example of the above, so if we are classing one group of them as workers we should the other and the quantitative difference in the price of the tools doesn’t matter
actually marx talks about this in terms of piecemeal work. there were plenty of tailors for example that owned property for their work that they wouldn’t have used personally unless they personally wanted to work. they were still considered proletarian but they owned their own tools. at what amount of money for the tool is the qualitative difference in your mind between personal and private? also a big part of why they were proletarian is because that mode of work ultimately drove prices for labor down and they screwed themselves in the long term and so could never become bourgeois.
most of these owner operators will never own a business where they exploit other truckers. that might be their dream but most of them are stuck being workers for a few companies doing long hours with no benefits and labor protections whether they like it or not. there are also many “classical” workers that are scabs and reactionary and don’t see themselves as workers, they have more in common with them than they care to realize
its an expensive tool for work, similar to owning your own tools as a journeyman in any trade. the tools are more expensive but its the tools needed for the job. and its different from renting because they are actually putting in the labor that generates the value, unlike with renting which is passive income for the owner. are they small business owners that exploit their own labor? technically yes, they are sole proprietors but if they effectively move things for the same companies anyway and have no choice about the matter they are basically reduced to being workers with no labor benefits that have expensive tools
